


Godfrey and Delaney

by kate_the_reader



Series: Sketchbook [3]
Category: Taboo (TV 2017)
Genre: 100-word Drabbles, Drabbles, M/M, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 14:44:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21272897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kate_the_reader/pseuds/kate_the_reader
Summary: Vignettes of what Godfrey and Delaney feel about each other. James Delaney's dark thoughts.





	1. Bait

**Author's Note:**

> A collection of 100-word drabbles written for the fictober 2019 challenge: the stories for each pairing are a multi-chapter story within a series. First published day-by-day on tumblr.

It would be easy to use him as bait, to set him to lure an easily corrupted adversary. He's so soft, so willing — once his fearful objections were overthrown — to do as he is bid. And he is alluring, there's no denying it. James shrugged off the confession of a schoolboy tenderness, but this is never to be admitted: he remembers that tender schoolboy with all his fragile beauty, his kindness, all too rare, and all the sweeter for it.

He could use Godfrey, if he was more reckless, more _evil_. But he won’t. Perhaps there’s hope for him yet.


	2. Swing

He had forgotten how the sight of James in the rigging made him feel, all those years ago at school — awed, and terrified. 

The breeze is not strong the first time he looks up through the maze of lines on the Good Hope and sees him there. It’s remarkable, that a man who has been land-bound (or so he supposed) for years, is still able to swing through the rigging with such easy grace. James is not a man possessed of much grace on solid ground, but out here, where everything is cleaner and simpler, he is lovely to watch.


	3. Ash

When James has gone, he taps the ash out of the pipe he lit for him - why did he play helpless and wait for James to perform that tiny service? - and forces his mind to go where it does not want to, to the casual insult dealt out like a blow with the back of the hand.

“Half a man.”

He was stupid to think, after the first evening, that James was at least indifferent to the way he lives. Stupid to think that James would accept counsel from him.

His hopes lie like his pipe ash, cold and disregarded.


	4. Tread

His tread is unmistakable. It’s not that his boots are heavier than the boots worn by other men. It is that his step is weighted with the readiness to do whatever it takes to achieve his goals, weighted by his implacable resolve. Weighted too, with what he has done, and what has been done to him. What he knows of the evil that men do, and of his own part in that evil. And weighted with the desire to sink and never rise, following those who sank before him.

Or so it seems to one who listens for his step, 


	5. Ghost

His mind is peopled by his ghosts, more real than the living he walks among.

His mother, torn from one home and cast out of another, condemned to drift in the mist over the water, always calling him to come to her real home.

The men and women and children he sent to the bottom of the ocean, weighed down by their chains, which tangle around his own limbs and drag him down to lie with them — where he belongs.

Now Zilpha. Her death is on his conscience. If he hadn't ruined her, would she have been prey to Geary? 


End file.
